My European trip part 2

The old part of Brescia was pleasant to stroll around, older buildings sprinkled with small bars and restaurants. There were mainly younger people about, enjoying the Sunday evening. Dinner is not until 8.00 in Italy, so we began with a drink and snacks at a bar. Our waitress was delighted to practice her English on us, and of course was immediately introduced to LingQ and given a card.

We then moved on to dinner, at a small restaurant which the hotel had recommended. The food was a little disappointing, a little heavy, too much butter. My preference is for that kind of Italian food which uses more olive oil. However, our head waiter made up for the deficiencies of the cuisine by his dramatic and theatrical presentation of the menu. In fact the whole atmosphere in the restaurant reminded me of a theatre play. We were the first to arrive for dinner and we caught the restaurant staff finishing their meal, sort of like catching actors on the stage in final preparation for the night's show. Soon after we arrived and sat down, more customers came in. Our head waiter took his oratory from table to table, and the guests soon started playing their assigned roles of talking with a great deal of animation and doing a lot of gesturing and gesticulating.

The next morning we went to visit the company which manufactures the equipment that we were interested in. The founder and president of the company had developed the technology over 20 years and had at times thought of giving up. Finally in 2000 his fortunes improved as the interest in small scale power generation from biomass received more attention and support from various European governments. Since then his sales and staff had grown dramatically. This gave me some encouragement for LingQ, where we have been working for a long time and hopefully a breakthrough awaits us.

Over the next few days we traveled by car and plane to different sawmills in Austria and Germany to see the equipment in use. I was impressed with how thoroughly these German sawmills are extracting every last bit of energy out of wood waste that we are far from fully utilizing in Canada. Of course, none of this activity would be economically feasible without support and subsidy from government. Our role will be to convince our government to provide a similar level of support for us to the same thing. Wood is CO2 neutral, and utilizing wood waste can contribute to less dependency on oil and gas for energy.

On Friday my companions left to return to Canada, and I started out on the next leg of my journey, my language journey. The first thing I did was visit Milan's largest book store.

Comments

[Mike]

"How does northern Italian cooking differ from southern Italian cooking? This is a mighty difficult question to answer without writing a book. Butter is the predominant fat for cooking in the north, while the central Italians who are kindred souls to the Southerners, love and use extra virgin olive oil as the main fat."

http://www.epicurean.com/articles/food-of-southern-italy.html

So I'd call the food you had traditional for the region, not deficient ...